You know that you’re providing a service that people want, but how do you connect them with that service? First, you have to figure out how they’re searching for that service, so that you can match your marketing and website to what they’re looking for. And since this is the sort of thing Google specializes in, they provide tools to help you, tools which Austin Coulson discusses in this week’s edition of Winning with SEO.
Last week, we talked about how SEO works. Specifically, how does Google decide who is going to show at the top of the list versus the bottom. We talked about your website being consistent, having a theme. And that really is a big part of what we’re going to talk about today, which is keywords. We also talked about how other sites that refer to you for your service, like commercial real estate, affects it, and how your reviews and what people are saying about you affects it.
So today, keywords. What are keywords? Keywords simply are what is somebody going to type into Google, a short phrase, 2 or 3 words, to find what I do, to find me, to find my services, right? So if we stick with the commercial real estate agent. We’re in Riverside, so if somebody types in “Commercial real estate riverside” I want to show up, or somebody wants to show up, right? That’s a keyword. Ok?
Today, the activity I’m going to give you is going to help you select your keywords that you want to focus on. Also, last week we talked about looking at some competitors. When you’re reading through their text, if you saw something like “Commercial real estate agent, Riverside” popping up over and over again, those are their keywords. So if this is competition, make a mental note, or actually write it down, because that’s going to be helpful in the future. But today, I’m going to tell you how to look at keywords and select some to focus on.
So, there’s a tool that Google offers called The Keyword Planning Tool. You have to have a Google account to do that, so Google that, “Keyword Planning Tool”, “Google keyword planning tool” and create a Google account or log in. It’s part of AdWords, but you’re not going to need a credit card. Don’t sign up for that part. If you’re doing AdWords, great. But that’s not what this is about. It just gives you access to that tool.
Go to the tool. On the side, it will let you put in keywords that you think are good, it’ll let you put in your website, and then it’ll determine what keywords it thinks you show up for, and it’ll let you pick the area. Do you want to focus on the US, do you want to focus on a city, a county, whatever. So you put that in there. Hit Search, it’s going to give you back a list of keywords that it thinks are relevant and good for you. When you look at the list, you’ll see first the keyword, and the order might be a little bit different, cuz I’m doing this off of the top of my head, but you’ll see the keyword, you’ll see the competition, which is going to be low, medium, and high, you’ll see the search volume, which is how many people each month are actually searching for it, and I think that’s it. I think those are the three main ones. If there’s more, don’t worry about them, those are the ones we need to worry about.
First, the keyword. Obviously, that exact phrase, those few words, is the one you want. Then there’s the competition: low, medium, high. High means there’s a lot of people, like, Re/Max or Zillow are competing for this term, so it’s going to be really hard to rank there. Doesn’t mean you can, but it’s harder. Medium or Low are kind of a sweet spot. So you want to look for medium and low, and then search volume, like I said, is literally how many people are searching each month. If you picked a specific city, then probably 50 or more searches each month is good. If you picked the US, you want a thousand or more. So find – that’s the activity of today – create an account, find five keywords that are relevant to what you do, really speak about what you do and what you want to be found for, have low to medium competition, and have good search volume.
With those, you’ll be able to do some searches and find your competitors, and you’ll be prepared for our future episodes where we’ll get into focusing, we’ll get into themes. When I talked about the website in the previous episode, I talked about it having a theme. Well, your theme starts with a keyword, and the theme is what we’re going to talk about next week.
As always, you can post questions down below, we’ll do our best to answer them. If you have any ideas for future episodes, we’re all ears. And tune in next week.
